Baroque on a Budget: The Rise of Haute Delusion

 

The Countess of Turkish Plastic Surgery;Katie Price

There was a time when gilded mirrors, tufted velvet, and ornate chandeliers belonged in Versailles. Or at least Vegas. Now they’re crammed into 2,400-square-foot tract homes in Tulsa and TikTok apartments with no closet doors. Welcome to Baroque on a Budget — a cultural moment where American (and Brits) have decided that if you can’t be rich, you can at least look rich… right up until your Afterpay defaults. It’s not just aesthetic. It’s emotional. 

The logical next step of a system where wealth is fantasy, class mobility is stalled, and appearance has become a survival mechanism. This is the Bravo Universe made flesh. Real Housewives meets a Buy Now Pay Later plan. Tesco caviar next to your kid’s orthodontist bill.

Let’s start with the truth: envy drives American taste. Not inspiration. Not refinement. Just weaponized longing in soft focus. The national style has become a patchwork of borrowed grandeur — Greco-Roman faux columns, oversized gold frames, bespoke pet beds, “Italian” marbled resin, tufted headboards with LED lights. Gold-accented coffee tables that could amputate a shin. Velvet couches in homes with no functioning HVAC.

These are not design choices. They are emotional coping mechanisms. Because the reality is this: you’re not ascending socially — you’re just getting better at faking it on Instagram.

The middle class, watching their futures erode, are now cosplaying the lives they were promised. We are living through the aestheticization of grief.

The McMansion boom of the early 2000s was America’s last gasp of architectural delusion. Cookie-cutter castles with five bedrooms, no insulation, and dining rooms no one has used since 2011. These homes are haunted — not by ghosts, but by economic confusion. Who lives in these houses? Divorced dads with too many throw pillows. Women who sell protein shakes on TikTok. Families drowning in student debt but still financing Nordic Tracks. 

The great room with the vaulted ceiling? Echoes like a tomb. The chandelier over the tub? Hung six feet too low. The kitchen island the size of a casket? Used exclusively for Safeway snack sorting, family screaming matches, and the occasional regretful charcuterie board.

We have entire subdivisions built to impress people who don’t visit. Vinyl siding trying to pass as stucco. Two-story foyers that feel like mausoleums. One half-dead plant next to a $200 mirror from Wayfair. “Live, Laugh, Love” in script font, clinging to drywall like a desperate prayer.

And now? Foreclosures are quietly ticking up again. HOA fines stacked against broken dreams. Trampolines rusting in yards where no one plays anymore. As one real estate analyst recently put it: “The McMansion is the mullet of architecture — business in the front, absolute chaos in the back.”

Jake Paul's horrid McMonster

 

This is an opportune to enter the Bravo Universe — where the Real Housewives have perfected a kind of performance wealth so chaotic, so deeply unstable, it deserves its own DSM classification:

Beverly Hills: Where every confession booth is sponsored by filler. Kyle Richards sobbing in a $3,000 sweatsuit over a sister feud no one understands. Erika Jayne swinging between “Xanax Barbie” and “Federal Indictment Couture.” 

Kyle Richards and Dorit something or other from Beverly Hills Housewives

 

New Jersey: Where you can smell the hairspray through the screen. McMansions dripping in drama, granite, and generational trauma. Furniture upholstered in PTSD bonding.

Salt Lake City: Church drama, felonies, and enough extensions to make a drag queen blush. These women hold hands during prayer circles and stab backs with diamond-crusted fingernails. It’s not wealth. It’s wealth drag — loud, glittering, over-contoured disaster. You can see the desperation in every Hermès belt. 

I watched episodes just for you and you people owe me my brain cells back! No amount of love for you could make me peep Real Housewives of Orange County. My last scrap of dignity revolted. 

Real Housewives of Salt Lake City at a Reunion show where usually the women act like they have never heard of shame and decorum. They cat fight and scream over each other to Andy Cohen's deep amusement and the audience's glee. No physical altercations have broken out but I think Andy is holding out hope. 

Bravo taught America that if you scream inside a mansion, it’s entertainment. That you can cry through Botox and no one will notice — as long as your lashes stay on. That you can fake friendships, fake wealth, and fake relevance, as long as the lighting is flattering. We didn’t just watch. We studied. Then we imitated. We built our personalities out of hashtags and hot tools. 

We as in the public, but not we as in us, because I know Manor residents are deeply uninterested in looking like orange bobbleheads with ratchet extensions in Chicago wind tunnels. Sabrina Carpenter has that look down and apparently her schtick sells, but not to us. Nay, we see her and we see what is happening around us and have made the personal executive decisions to side step this mess and remain on the sidelines waiting for the inevitable crash when societal gravity kicks in and all this tumbles into a tacky heap of broken hope and outlandish dreams.  

America’s fantasy of wealth has always been weirdly obsessed with Britain. Not the real Britain — not Tesco meal deals, NHS delays, or drafty rentals — but the Downton Abbey hallucination of feathered hats, buttered crumpets, and inherited estates. We want their crowns but none of the cold houses or boarding school drama. We borrowed their powdered wigs and left the truth. But what’s more tragic than American fantasy? It is how the British have now started LARPing as their own aristocracy. It is Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet!!!) on meth. 

Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Spreadsheet Branding, has adopted a Received Pronunciation accent so lofty it makes Princess Ann sound like she worked at Marks & Spencer. Her plummy vowels are more royal than her husband’s — Prince William, the man who looks like a haunted drawing of a nobleman. Kate is narrative costuming in a coat dress. She personifies this class obsession by pretending she was never a middle class day student at a posh school, no, with this transformation you would think she was to the manor born. It is tedious to watch and exhausting to realize how hard she worked to create this mirage. Sadder to imagine being embarrassed on one's respectable roots and getting away with it. 

 

Then there’s the transformation formula: upgrade from a semi to a detached, slap a hyphen on your new triple barreled surname, Howard-Rutland-Cavendish (as if) and start saying “loo” instead of toilet. Let’s not forget the Essex man who bought a hunting dog named Winston and now wears tweed to pretend he’s descended from landed gentry instead of Ladbrokes. The only thing he’s hunting is respect — and no one is fooled.

Essex is like Miami/Vegas/Jersey/Orange County Bravo shows had a baby in England.

“The reality of the English class system is so disguised that the very people who are most victimized by it often deny that it exists.” 

 

Tatler continues its breathless coverage of the gentry — a gentry that wants nothing to do with the people reading it. You will never marry into the club. The club will not even acknowledge your application. Britain, dripping with class tension, still refuses to admit the cruelty of its private club structure. Accents are dead giveaways. The wrong shoes will betray you. And no amount of Jo Malone scented candles from Liberty will buy you access to a world you weren’t born into. “Britain is a country that pretends class doesn’t exist, while being obsessed with it.”

From the outside, it is absurdity at its highest level even from the inside view. It is nearly a Shakespearean comedy at its cruelest. People obsessed with people who barely register that they even exist or bother to know their habits and inner sociological workings. I have a birds eye view and it is stunning with how bone deep class is in the UK and how much people can disdain those who have the inside track, yet ape them with their elocution lessons and jaunts to the country. I cringe because I don't believe in it, yet I benefit from it and I want to say to everyone I meet, "I am so sorry" For what? I have no idea but I do feel guilty. 

The last time American women invaded the British upper class was in the 19th century when the Lordlings were desperately trying to save their estates, so they chose American heiresses with a lot of money and a desire for titles. "Downton Abbey" had that dynamic down and its origins were in fact based in truth. Only this time I am the only invader, unless you count a handful of others of color, but those ladies had money to begin with and I have no money or direct pedigree; you have to dig in my 23 and Me to find it to recommend me. Hey does it count that I am related to Louis XV? (Oh shit that ended in a bloody Revolution!) Nevermind. As you were. 

It happened anyway and not everyone is friendly about it, some are hostile and surprisingly, it isn't the upper class that mostly looks at me suspiciously (though there are those who do look at me like I have two heads, one eye and smell like I fell down a "loo"), it is the middle class and working class people who seem to find me unseemly and unworthy. Full stop. As if they are the sentinels protecting their intractable class system. Strange. I will never understand it. Meanwhile I am a Socialist and so none of it makes a lick of sense. I just watch, write in my journal and laugh or complain silently about living in a drafty house marching around in my wellies and stuffing my face with scones while drinking my way through the wine cellar. 

Very real, very wealthy aristocrats, The Duke of Grosvenor (center). If anyone tells you they are a dying, breed howl with laughter and pat them on the head the sweet child they are. Many of them are wealthier than the crown but don't flaunt it or court attention and club is decidedly closed.  

In the meantime, on other fronts all around the world, plastic surgery tourism is booming. Katie Price and those Bravo twins are horrific poster children for this phenomena. Clinics are offering BBLs with punch cards. Women fly across the world to wake up in hotel rooms filled with surgical tape, bruises, and regret. We are watching an entire culture morph into digital hallucinations. People are bringing FaceTuned selfies to surgeons and asking to be turned into sex dolls with glitchy filters. Instagram Influencers now look like tributes to other Influencers. Identikit bodies with inflatable lips, laminated brows, snatched jaws. “Fox eye” surgery, cheek filler, under-eye blurring, cat-mouth lifts. The result? Startled prairie animal meets TikTok reboot.

They’re asking to look like people who don’t even look like themselves. And it’s working — they all match. The delusion is surgical. The result is spiritual erosion.

Ma'am. Ma-am. 

 

Then there’s Gen Z — raised on YouTube tutorials, fake flexes, and a world that treats financial ruin like a content strategy. They are emotionally agile, highly intelligent, and completely confused. I know it does sounds counterintuitive to call them intelligent but they have access to information we never had and they absorb it - wrongly. They think $300 skincare routines are a personality. They live at home and wear $1,200 sneakers. They curate perfect aesthetics in their bedrooms while hiding from the reality that they may never own a home. 

This influencer showed people how twisted the reality vs. IG can be. 

They are not vain. They are in pain. They are trying to perform value in a system that hasn’t given them any. They’ve been sold self-worth through subscription boxes. Wholeness through a thick filter and Sephora.  Relevance through likes. The result is a lost generation with luminous skin and no exit plan. I feel pity for them because I can't imagine that kind of yawning abyss where my future should be. 

And yet…not everyone is lost in the funhouse. 

There is a quiet rebellion underway. A return to normal. A new class of people refusing the aesthetic death spiral and choosing substance. People who paint their walls beige, keep their cars paid off, and sleep well. Who own two good outfits and wear them proudly. Who say, “No, thank you,” to fake grandeur and “Yes, please,” to actual peace. People who may never own a marble bathroom but know their credit score, blood pressure, and worth.

Because wealth is not what you wear. It’s what you can walk away from. Let the others keep chasing clout in resin-drenched kitchens and cryogenically frozen faces. The sane people will be here — stirring soup, reading library books, and enjoying the radical freedom of being unbranded and debt-free.

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